Two-Hour Marathon Seen as Question of When, Not if

Emmanuel Mutai had set a course record in London on Sunday when he ran the marathon in 2:04:40. His record was broken the next day. ‘‘I think it’s a matter of time before we start running the marathon in two hours,’’ he said later.Credit
Tom Dulat/Getty Images

BOSTON — The two-hour marathon may be the modern-day equivalent of the four-minute mile before Roger Bannister smashed through the barrier in 1954, followed in the years since by thousands of other men.

“The two-hour marathon is the same in that people believed it impossible for so long,” said Mary Wittenberg, president of New York Road Runners and director of the New York City Marathon. “And I think in just the last 10 years we’ve gone from thinking, ‘Is it possible?’ to, ‘It’s a matter of when.’ ”

Races Sunday and Monday hardly discouraged those who see it coming. On two courses in different conditions, two Kenyan men named Mutai smashed records.

First, Emmanuel Mutai chopped 30 seconds off the course record in London, finishing in 2 hours 4 minutes 40 seconds. The next day in Boston, Geoffrey Mutai, with the help of a tail wind, ran the fastest marathon, 2:03:02, on the hilly course that usually produces slower times than other elite marathons.

Geoffrey Mutai’s time does not count as a world record even though it was nearly a minute faster than the existing mark, 2:03:59, set by Haile Gebrselassie in 2008 in Berlin. The Boston course does not meet the record requirements of the I.A.A.F., track and field’s international governing body, because of its layout and vertical drop.

Race officials have nonetheless applied for world-record ratification, and however stiff the tail wind, this was still the fastest time in Boston by nearly three minutes. The race was run, unlike in Berlin in 2008, without designated pacesetters, although the American Ryan Hall set a torrid early pace without having been hired to do so.

“I think it’s a matter of time before we start running the marathon in two hours,” Emmanuel Mutai told reporters in Kenya after returning home from London.

Photo

At the 2011 Boston Marathon, Geoffrey Mutai of Kenya crossed the finish line with the record time of 2:03:02.Credit
Brian Snyder/Reuters

Chasing ever-lower numbers has often created the wrong kind of positive news for the sport, which is why track officials, concerned about doping, have tried to emphasize duels over records in recent years. But the two-hour mark, like the four-minute barrier in the 1950s, is irresistibly round and resonant.

The odds are against one of the Mutais being the barrier-buster. Emmanuel would need to drop nearly five minutes off his London time; Geoffrey would need to drop more than three off his astonishing time in Boston and more than four and a half off his previous best. To break two hours would require averaging 4 minutes 35 seconds per mile for the 26.2-mile race — 8 seconds faster than Geoffrey Mutai averaged Monday.

Such gains might not sound daunting to those who are not elite marathoners, but those at the top know what kind of math (and oxygen debt) they are up against. It required 24 years, after all, to move the marathon mark — incrementally — from 2:08:05 to just under 2:04.

The half-marathon world record is 58:23. A sub-two-hour marathon would require coming close to that and then, gasp, doing it again.

The odds then are more in favor of the next generation, even if it will be worth watching when Kenenisa Bekele, the fastest distance runner in history on the track, switches to the marathon. Gebrselassie, 38, predicts that the two-hour barrier will be broken but has said it will take 20 to 25 years.

The trick, of course, is doing it on an approved course, and other projections — based in part on the increased depth at the top — are rather optimistic. David Martin, an exercise physiologist and coach who has long been a leading marathon statistician, updated his calculations last year and projected that someone — probably an Ethiopian, Kenyan, Moroccan or Eritrean — would go under two hours in the spring of 2015.

That is much earlier than the projection of around 2030 that Martin said he came up with when he first crunched the numbers in 1996. That year, using the same methodology, he also predicted that a woman would break through the 2:20 barrier by the spring of 2001.

“We were off, because it happened in the fall,” Martin said, laughing, referring to Naoko Takahashi’s record run in Berlin in September 2001.

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Britain's Roger Bannister, a 25-year-old medical student, became the fastest man in the world in 1954 when he completed the four-minute mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds during a race in Oxford, England.Credit
Associated Press

Martin said he used regression analysis, making equations based on the fastest marathon each year on a course that meets the present criteria for world-record eligibility, beginning with the Paris Olympics in 1924.

“Over the last six, seven years, the men have made remarkable strides,” Martin said. “There are more people running fast, not just one man. Now there are lots of men and different countries trying to outdo each other in Africa. There’s a greater mass of humanity training for the marathon.”

François Péronnet and Guy Thibault, researchers from the University of Montreal, plan to re-employ a sophisticated projection method they developed in 1989 that is based on a mathematical model for the physiology of marathon running. In their original projection, the record was to be 2:05:23 by 2000, 1:59:36 by 2028 and 1:57:18 by 2040.

Still, some wonder whether pacesetters are essential after Moses Mosop, a marathon neophyte, pushed Geoffrey Mutai to the finish in Boston.

“Monday certainly introduced the concept that, in the end, perhaps pure competition would be a greater driver than more of a mechanical race,” Wittenberg said. “That pure instinct to race helps people truly do things that they never thought they could do. In so many sports, it’s mind over body.”

There will be other incentives, too. The quest to be the first under two hours is highly marketable.

“The money the man who breaks two hours would earn would be tremendous,” said Thomas Steffens, an author of many books on running and the communications chief for the Berlin Marathon. “It’s a great challenge, something the guys will go for, but I would rather think it might even enhance the idea of doing something illegal to get there.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 23, 2011, on Page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: Two-Hour Marathon Is Seen as a Question of When, Not If. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe